Which is just as well, as it's taken me bloody ages to get round to writing this up...
So. Consulting the list, what was the next batch of albums to emerge, blinking, into the light, from my little box of wonders?
First up, The Avalanches - 'Since I Left You'.
I'd bought this when it first came out, in 2001, off the back of the title track / single. It had a fascinating gestation, made by two Aussies, and was basically a cut 'n' paste job of about 3,500 samples. You can read it's wiki entry here - do, because it's fascinating.
Like many of my albums, I'd listened to snippets here and there, and the singles, which, if memory serves correctly, were the title track, plus 'Frontier Psychiatrist'.
Before I met my wife, the lovely Katie, I had a gaping hole in my music collection. I had nothing that I would class as 'Dance music'. I had proper dance music - stuff that I would dance to at a wedding : 70's and 80's finest. The Bee Gees, Earth, Wind & Fire, Odyssey - you know the sort of thing.
I might have to put some on now - I'm a great dancer.
But not "dance" music. The sort of 80's / 90's stuff made by serious looking people hunched over keyboards in studios, and usually fronted by a woman with a big pair of lungs. I heard three or four songs and just wrote off the whole genre as 'rubbish'.
Katie, on the other hand, had bought quite a lot of this stuff. Usually after having been out all night listening to it and throwing shapes to it in some club until the small hours...
In January 2000, when I moved in with my wife-to-be, I winced as my CD collection became... contaminated... by this awful stuff.
But strangely, it appeared that, while Top Of The Pops had played exclusively crap dance music, some good stuff had made it though.
And Katie had bought a lot of it.
So my eyes became opened to the possibility that not all dance music was rubbish.
And it was under this heading that I assumed 'Since I Left You' would be filed. But you know what?
It wasn't.
It's just great music. Most of the time it's good, foot-tapping tunes, and every now and again a sample so recognisable would pop up that I'd have to stop and rummage through the recesses of my brain, thinking 'where did that come from?'
DSP rating : 7
But it was soon gone, and followed with...
Ah! I remember this.
Matt and I communicate at work with an 'instant messenger' type bit of software called Sametime. Unlike email, where you are presented with a finished document, Sametime pushes the text over to the recipient every time you hit the return key, and so when we send each other the next five choices, we see them
arrive
one
at
a
time.
This next album was the first or second on the list, but as soon as Matt saw the title, he said that he instantly disregarded whatever the next three or four were. He had no idea what it was, but the title was enough.
It was a coverdisc that had come with a copy of Classic Rock magazine, as it turns out, and it was called 'Rock Hellraisers'.
Which, I have to agree, as titles go, is pretty good.
This turned out to be a mix of of old campaigners like the New York Dolls, the Quireboys and the Black Crowes (I have an opinion on the Black Crowes which I shall expound upon at some point in the future), and unknowns (to me anyway), like Foxtrot Oscar and Jaded Sun.
I tend to be wary of free coverdiscs, largely because there's no such thing as a free coverdisc.
That CD wasn't put together by some music hack, thinking 'This is going to be an awesome CD full of the greatest music ever!'. It's a CD put together by someone juggling the requests of record companies who want a track from their artists' new album on there and the need to put a few recognisable artists names' on the cover to pull in the wavering punter. Which is why you often end up with things like an unreleased outtake of a early single's 'B' side by a BIG NAME ARTIST!
But over the years, I've found that Classic Rock tends to be a fairly reliable choice, and so it was. A bunch of good rocking tunes from start to finish. But then that sort of thing goes down well in our house. If we're not listening to Radio 4, there's a good chance we're listening to Planet Rock. A radio station that believes in, well, Rock with a capital 'R' and not a lot else, basically.
DSP rating : 6
So that CD came to a close, and I was (metaphorically) pumping my fist and banging my head. Let's keep rawking! I would have typed to Matt.
But it turns out that Matt, however, can be a complete ba***rd when he wants to be.
History does not record what the other four choices on this particular selection were. Just the one that he picked.
'The Irish Folk Collection'
As mentioned previously, when you get an unfamiliar selection, the first thing you do is check how many songs there are on an album, just in case it's a duffer. This, it turned out, was a 4CD set. And I'd imported them as one collection.
60 songs...
I could hear the laughter from six floors down...
Now there may be some people who are puzzled by this. Not Matt laughing - as I said, he can be a vindictive so-and-so when he wants to. But my heart sinking at 60 Irish Folk songs.
"Surely it's your iPod. Surely it's your music. What's the problem?"
Let me explain.
A while ago, Katie & I decided to undertake some voluntary work, and both being music fans, Katie noticed a request for volunteers at our local hospital radio station that sounded up our street. We duly volunteered, were accepted, and spent just about every Monday night for the next six years creating a two hour program with our 'presenter', Nigel, who became a firm friend. We'd get all sorts of requests, and despite the station having a wide variety of music, it didn't have everything.
So, knowing that a patient who requested something obscure would, in all likelihood, still be there the following Monday, quite often I'd take advantage of having the country's biggest record shop just down the road from my office, and I'd go and pick up some of this stuff.
Hence the Irish Folk.
At least most of the songs were mercifully short.
I don't remember much about this album to be honest. It's just a vague memory of people leaving, people returning, people dying, people going off to war, and a lot of singing about green things. Green trees, green leaves, the green, (and the rub of it).
And penny whistles. Lots of penny whistles.
When the iPod is on shuffle at home, and one of these songs comes up, it's a novel distraction for a couple of minutes.
When you have to listen to three hours, four minutes and 2 seconds of it, it's a whole different ball game.
Obviously you can't sit listening to music in the office all day - you have to talk to people, go to meetings, answer the phone, eat lunch. Which means that a three hour album can take more than three hours to listen to. If I remember rightly, this album took eight years to get through.
Well that's what it felt like, anyway.
But eventually, some time the next day, maybe the day after, I finished the seemingly endless tales of men walking over hills with pigs under their arms.
DSP rating : 3
What was up next?
Who cares? Anything was going to be better!
And it was!
'Lionel Richie & The Commodores - The Definitive Collection'
The good stuff was great! Brick House, Dancing On The Ceiling, All Night Long, Easy.
Even the bad stuff ("Hello", I'm looking at you!) was ok.
Today, music is made in bedrooms by spotty teenagers with a PC and a keyboard.
Back then, music was made by musicians. Musicians who had learned their craft, could actually play, and could write a good tune.
And when they'd written that good tune, and played it to the best of their ability, they'd go and hire a mahoosive orchestra to put lush strings - real strings mind, not 'Strings 4' from the YamaRolorg XY42J8(a) super-synth - on the back of it, to make it sound even better!
On the whole, a good couple of days.
*Given that most of the music on the iPod is mine, there's not a lot of suffering. I have impeccable taste.
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